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Saturday, July 1, 2017

Sepia Saturday: McKinnon's farm, Homerton

In 1952 my parents moved from a wheat farm in the Wimmera to a dairy farm at Homerton on the south coast of Victoria. I was three years old and my younger brother just one.

Our parents owned the farm for about 35 years so I grew up there and have many happy memories of the farm and the district.

Just a few years ago I met a lady by chance who, as a child, was friends with the girl in the first photo below, Heather McKinnon. The McKinnons had owned our farm before us and I was delighted when Heather gave me some copies of old photographs she had of the farm.

It's been interesting to compare what the farm looked like in the 1930s and as I remember it from the 1950s. Some of the buildings were still there, some not. Dad used a tractor rather than horses. Even the trees and vegetation in the background are interesting.

The three photos below were taken on different occasions so I think the cream cart must have been used to entertain visitors as well as their real purpose of taking the cream cans to the end of the lane for pickup and probably for carting other items around the farm as well. Heather was an only child so I imagine she was very skilled with horses and other farm work.

Heather McKinnon with her dogs on the horse-drawn cream sled.

Visitors with the dogs on the cream sled.

When we bought the farm we moved into the McKinnon's home (in the photo below) but it was quite old and we only lived there for about three years before my parents built a new house. Some of the garden trees still exist but the house in this photo is long gone.

Visiting children on the cream sled.

This post has been in response to Sepia Saturday's theme photo of dogs. You can see other responses here.

11 comments:

That cream sled being pulled by horses could probably have held a lot more weight! I've never seen anything like it. So great to have photos of different times of the same place, showing changes through history.

Great to get photos of the farm from before you lived there. I must ask the lady who sold to us if she has any old photos of the house, as her family had owned it for a few decades and the house next door was owned by her family from about 1914 until her mother sold last year.

I've never seen a sled like that, either. Interesting. And obviously, the children had fun either riding or sitting on it - with their dogs, and without 'em. But of course the dogs link your post with the prompt, so good thing the kiddos had them with them in one of the pictures. :)

For years I've thought of contacting people who now live in houses I once lived in and giving them photos of what it once looked like. I always thought they might enjoy the history. You've convinced me this might be true.

And I'm betting when that horses tail went up those kids went scrambling. The problem is being so low behind the horses unlike being in a buggy or wagon.